A War Reporter’s Family is Suing the Assad Regime Over Her Death

A new lawsuit accuses Syria of deliberately targeting Marie Colvin to silence her.

Marie Colvin, the American-born, London-based war correspondent in 2011Writer Pictures/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As the Syrian government launched a scorched-earth siege of Homs in early 2012, the American war reporter Marie Colvin holed up in a clandestine media center inside the city, sending out live broadcasts on the attack’s heavy civilian casualties. “There are rockets, shells, tank shells, anti-aircraft being fired in parallel lines into the city,” she said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the pre-dawn hours of February 22, 2012. “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

It was Colvin’s last call to CNN. Later that morning, the Syrian military fired directly at the makeshift media center. Using a targeting method called “bracketing,” rockets and mortars landed on each side of the center, the rounds inching closer until eventually, a rocket struck outside the front door as Colvin and her colleagues attempted to evacuate. Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed immediately, and shrapnel and debris severely injured the French reporter Edith Bouvier and Colvin’s colleagues, Paul Conroy and Wael al-Omar.

At the time, the Syrian Information Ministry said that the government was unaware that Colvin and Ochlik were in the country. However, a federal lawsuit filed over the weekend on behalf of Colvin’s family alleges that the Syrian government targeted the media center “with premeditation” to silence Colvin and other media critics of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The civil complaint claims that Colvin was deliberately assassinated by high-ranking officials within the Assad government. “Marie Colvin was killed for exposing the Assad regime’s slaughter of innocent civilians to the world,” said attorney Scott Gilmore of the Center for Justice and Accountability, which is representing her family, in a statement. “The regime wanted to wage a war without witness against the democratic opposition. To do that, they needed to neutralize the media.”

The suit accuses high-ranking officials within the Assad regime of deliberately assassinating Colvin.

The case, which is the result of a three-year investigation that draws on captured government documents and statements from defectors, seeks unspecified financial damages from the Syrian government. The suit alleges that Syrian intelligence officers got a tip that foreign reporters were staying at the media center in Homs and tried intercept Colvin’s broadcast satellite signal. After pinpointing her location, Syrian forces shelled her position with artillery strikes, the complaint states.

Colvin, who was 56 at the time of her death, had a reputation for courageousness while covering some the world’s most violent conflicts over the two decades that she reported for the London-based Sunday Times. She wore an eye patch after suffering an injury in an explosion while covering Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2001.

Her family’s suit is the first case yet that aims to hold the Assad regime responsible for war crimes. It was filed under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a relatively obscure federal law that allows Americans to sue nations that are designated as sponsors of terrorism. “It’s very hard to hold a foreign state accountable for war crimes,” says Dixon Osburn, the executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability. But with the Colvin case, says Osburn, “we had the jurisdictional perfect storm of being able to have the plaintiff and defendant that both fit the statute.”

Previously, FSIA has been invoked against the Vatican in cases involving clergy sexual abuse. It also protected Saudi Arabia when families and victims of the 9/11 attacks filed a lawsuit alleging that Saudi leaders had financed Al Qaeda. In 1980, plaintiffs used FSIA to successfully sue the government of Chile for the assassination of its former ambassador to the United States, and in 1992, the act was cited in a torture suit against Argentina.

“The Colvin family recognizes that they’re in a unique position to bring this lawsuit, and there are so many others who have lost sons and daughters who don’t have the same kind of opportunity,” says Osburn. “The hope is to provide some voice about what’s happening in Syria, about what happened at the siege of Homs, and to shed light on the atrocities that have been committed.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate